One of the parts of this research project is to move from individual boxes for searching documents, accounts items etcetera; towards one place where all the searches can be reached. Hold your horses however. Not one search across all entities (yet), but a simpler way to find what you need. One of the things I am personally enthusiastic about is that it will not only offer you suggestions based on what you typed but it will also open up your history of recently used data. Since a pictures says more than a thousand words, just take a look on some screenshots.

For those of you who have read between the lines, this is not yet a final deliverable nor is it planned for a certain date. Our intentions are however clear; to make Exact Synergy simpler to use and better connected to business processes. So enjoy the sharing but do not yet see this as an end deliverable available in your environment end of this month . I also tried to keep this post simple, so it leaves lot’s of room for interpretation on what you will get. For instance think of a first deliverable where the focus can be on the employee self service functionality.

Image credit for the header image: Davydutchy (from Flickr).

For mail merges and e-mail marketing campaigns the current options might not be thorough enough. Off late we are exploring the possibilities to filter data more granular. One thing we for instance are thinking of is to make it possible to tag your accounts and contact persons. Basically this would offer you full flexibility to not only make extensive selections but also gives you the option to let many people in the organization ‘structure’ the data. The tagging could in this case be based on a defined taxonmy (corporate tags).

You could for instance request your account managers to glag the contacts which would be interested (or should be invited ) for an upcoming seminar. The solution of tagging is inspired on various talks with customers and business partners. We also would be interested in hearing from you how you solve this. I have for instance heard:

- linking accounts to a specific project
- creating ‘marketing’ requests (basically a ‘Yes, invite for this event’ request)
- searching via Synergy and refinement in Excel

It would be great if you could spent some words in a reply how you do it at your company.

Now with all these camera phones this is usually a lot easier than to have the notes typed out, and as an image paints a …. you do not loose the creative thoughts.

Last night I was looking for inspiration to come to a simple and easy to use, one search box for Synergy, via the bulk upload I uploaded the screenshots into a single project document. Perhaps the bulk upload is also of help to you!? Leave me a reply on scenarios you use it for (or if you have some inspiration on the one search box )

Are you interested in using this? You will find it in the Document menu via ‘Entry – Bulk upload’, the wizard will assist you comfortably. Your Synergy version should be at least 240 to find the bulk upload in your Synergy menu.

Image credits for the bulk carrier: dioramadays.com.

In combination with our partner Zoomio we have added automated e-mail marketing into Exact Synergy. Zoomio has a proven (and rewarded) product for this and together we have integrated it into Exact Synergy and also white-labeld it so it will be known as ‘Exact Synergy Campaigner‘. A solution to execute targetted e-mail marketing campaigns towards your Synergy contacts with sounds follow-up.

This can replace, or complement, any traditional (written) marketing you currently execute. Where the great things is that it makes your marketing trackable. Which article from the newsletter is read best, which pages we refer to are visitted most, which customers read my info best and go deepest into my websites. All this information is now delivered to you and since it integrates with Synergy; you can also share it across the company outside the marketing department.

E-mails sent are stored in Synergy, all campaign information is linked to the project and clicks at links or entered webforms are followed up via workflow by the right person (for instance the account manager).

In a nutshell it works like this (I created this via prezi as an experiment with a new way of presenting stuff, follow the link to Prezi to see interactive file there).

Exact Synergy automated marketing - Click to enlarge

Would you like to know more about Exact Synergy Campaigner than please visit our Dutch Exact site.

Header image taken from molblog.nl

The document downloader is a small application that you install on your computer. It gives you the full document search to make your selection and do the download. Within your selection you can even make it more specific and you can also use search templates. The document body will be stored as HTML and all attachments in their original format.

The document downloader is part of Exact Synergy Enterprise product update 242, so get subscribed to the controlled release program and try it out yourself. The document downloader is a very usefool tool: it leverages the full advanced documents search and its possibilities are numerous.

For the upcoming new release of Exact Synergy Enterprise we will amongst others deliver a redesigned screen for creating a new request. Since this is one of the most often used parts of our application we wanted to improve the user experience of it and needed to be sure on how to do this best. Not just the looks-and-feel but we want to support every user better in reaching her goals: starting a new workflow in a simple and easy way.

…

I hope that from my initial posting it was clear that we did think a lot about existing customers. Especially here we got a lot of requests to make this simple.

We have done user observations and user interviews at various sites where we literally looked over the shoulder of users. This was part of a project to get a better understanding of our users and their daily usage of our products. The current user experience. So it hurts me and my team when there is doubt on this (even in capitals ), you can however disagree whether we did this right. That conclusion I clearly make and we take the lessons learned humbly.

What did we learn?

• For companies who show or have a limited set of requests the top x section might be redundant or too long
• It was not a good decision to not make a distinction between the daily create request page and the maintenance page. Here we violated our own goal-directed designed approach. The users of these different pages have different goals when using them
• Although also many people see an improvement we might have better not just replaced the old page but introduced the new one next to it
• Since we value all your input, we will work on a way to re-introduce the IDs. One way or the other. Where our focus will be to still have an over viewable list. Where I have spoken about it hurts, it also hurts me when you guys are now putting the IDs in the description. Our aim was not to make your lifes more complicated. So point taken and we will work on a solution.

Last but not least we feel also strengthened by the many reactions, on the vision behind this to make the usage of Exact Synergy Enterprise more simple. That is one of the reasons why we on purpose didn’t choose for a setting, which was more a choice of design than a development decision. Here Andre Speek was spot on for our rational.

Thanks again for being a customer, business partner or colleague! We truly appreciate your replies and the engagement to our product and company this shows. I will update you later on how (and when) we take the lessons learned forward.

Photo credit: LiveFromAmsterdam

This addition comes on top of the existing option to directly create a document with attachments, to a request. This option can be very useful when the files you are attaching need specific Synergy links. The new option is there to make it simple to just attach a (set of) image(s) for instance.

Photo credit: TooFarNorth

Click image for full-size

So we did quite some research with a set of customers on how they use the current screen, how many request types they have, which ones they actively used et cetera. Now that the new screen is in controlled release we get mixed feedback on one specific part, via this post I would like to open up for more feedback to make sure we deliver the right experience to you.

Our user research learned us a couple of things which resulted in these design principles for the new screen:

• an average company will have over 50 different request types
• most users use about five to ten of them frequently
• the request type categories are not very well known within the user group
• searching for a specific less frequently used request is quite cumbersome and only a limited number of users is using the search option of Internet Explorer [CTRL+F] for this
• the request ID box is only used by a limited number of user to create a new request
• the majority of the users is unaware of how to use it or what to enter in it

Based on the findings we have redesigned the looks and working of the screen with the following three key parts.

• A list of the requests most used by you as a person
• An easy way to create a request by ID and request name
• A list with all available request types

Click image for full-size

The mixed feedback is especially on this last part. Since during our research we learned that a limited number of users where aware of the request type IDs (e.g. a Vacation request is number 103) we did not include them in the list. The ordering used to be on number but for people it is easier to scan alphabetically since the name of a request gives a better understanding than the number. For the unaware user it was hard to scan the list we learned. So our aim was to increase the readability and hence an easier recognition by just using the request names. The users which now the IDs are still served by the request creator, in this field you can either enter the code or the request name.

Via this post I hope to get more feedback on especially this part. Should the request IDs be re-introduced in the list and even more important what is for you the reason to use it? Maybe as a last remark, removing the request ID was not a goal by itself. During our user research of the last year we often got the feedback that the screens of Exact Synergy are quite loud, they offer a lot of options. Redesigning the complete request page has been done with keeping this in mind, make the screens easier to understand by offering less options and the options offered are a perfect fit for your goals. Please reply with your thoughts!

Last week I saw another example of this, it may look simple but I belief it is a small example of a bigger truth. In our product there are a set of searchboxes on the left -hand side to quickly jump to, for instance, an item code. Let’s say you are looking for more information on the item SYN0000 (it is one of the products you sell). You got the code in an e-mail from a colleague and you want to look it up in Exact Synergy Enterprise. So double click it, please try.

If you do this in Windows it will help (??) you by also selecting the trailing space behind it. Our product used to search for the item code including that space, hence it found nothing. So it was decided (as a reaction to customer feedback) to support you by ignoring that space. Now my actual story starts, it is not about how to solve this problem best, but about what happened after the change (cutting off the space at the end).

During one of our feedback rounds with customer stakeholders it was found out that an undocumented feature of our product now was broken. The search allowed you to enter only a space (‘ ‘) and if you would search, then you would get all items in result. By removing the space, as was requested earlier, it searched for nothing now. So a report was entered to fix this. Without any reason why: just fix it. It was first rejected. I can partly understand why: who would like to search for everything? That is not ‘searching’ but just ‘data browsing’ for which we have nice overviews with much more convient options. Which customer would like to walk-through all item data in a search? It was more work to re-introduce this and it looked like there were better alternatives; so the report was rejected.

Only then the context came in, as quite some customers seemed to have discovered this feature to easily see everything, and were quite content with it. People used it for instance to walk-through the documents created during that day within the company. So, to stay informed about all the work their colleagues were doing, searching in this way helping them to be informed and serve their customers better. With the context it was crystal clear this needed to be supported.

Adding context has two great benefits: it creates clarity and helps people to understand the real issue. And secondly and as least as important: we learn more about the actual usage of software. And that is essential to make people benefit from it even more.

Photo credit: emagic

Colleagues and customers involved come from all parts of the organization and from all over the globe. Customer Support in China, pre-sales from the US and consultant from The Netherlands. Viewing it from these different angles is important and sometimes leads to surprises. For example: we have adjusted our search functionality for Exact Synergy Enterprise so that it now can find <Jiří> just by typing <Jiri>. So, the search now also excludes the diacritics. We used the word ‘transliteration’ for this in our release documentation. We realized that it had a broader meaning, but we thought we scoped it clearly in the other parts of the documentation. The question from China however was: can I now find  <收件人> just by typing <shoujianren>? Indeed Google does have this functionality, but this is a step we have not yet made. ‘Searching=Finding’ will however keep on having our focus.

Photo credit: Desirée Delgado